55 Quotes About Proust

You will close your eyes. And listen carefully . . . . You must learn to listen carefully when people talk to you about their death. We each carry our own death within us, and we feel when it is there.

I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence...

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

You're as strong as the Pont Neuf. You'll live to bury us all!

The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except herhusband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she hadalways felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that shedisplayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that wouldnever bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can findtranquillity.

No doubt, few people understand either the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon of love, or how it creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world, and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves. So there are few who see anything natural in the disproportionate dimensions which we come to perceive in a person who is not the same as the one they see.

El pasado, decía Proust, no sólo es fugaz, es que no se mueve de sitio. Con París pasa lo mismo, jamás ha salido de viaje. Y encima es interminable, no se acaba nunca.

Carried away in a sort of dream, he smiled, then he began to hurry back towards the lady; he was walking faster than usual, and his shoulders swayed backwards and forwards, right and left, in the most absurd fashion; altogether he looked, so utterly had he abandoned himself to it, ignoring all other considerations, as though he were the lifeless and wire-pulled puppet of his own happiness.

I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinancy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.